RuneScape: Dragonwilds is now out on early access, and both longtime fans of the franchise and complete newcomers who just love survival games are checking it out. To help you progress a little faster or at least make your first few hours go by a little smoother, here are some tips from someone who’s a huge fan of both RuneScape and the survival genre in general!
Tip #1 – Hoard Those Runes
After Zanik teaches you how to craft and use runes, you probably already have an idea of how useful magic is going to be in the game. As early as possible, spend some of your time mining essence as you run around the map, then craft them into various runes.
Yes, you’ll only have a couple of spells to use at the start, but after leveling up your other skills for a bit, you’re going to gain access to stuff that will significantly speed up your progress. Here’s a few sample scenarios:
- Fast Woodcutting: Cast Axtral Projection to chop down a line of trees, and then use Splinter to instantly break the logs apart.
- Easy Mining: Use Detect Ore + Clay to search for nearby nodes, and then use Rocksplosion to instantly mine some of them.
- Creative Builder: Eye of Oculus is a spell that people who love building stuff will be using a lot.
- Quick Production: The Superheat spell can be used to pretty much double the speed of any crafting/refining station that uses fire. It has a very low cooldown too.
- Melee Champion: With the use of Tempest Shield and Enchant Weapon, you can cut through crowds like butter or become an unkillable tank (or both).
Set up a rune altar at your base and make a habit out of crafting a few stacks of every element you can currently make. My personal method is to just use 10-20+ essence for every rune type, and this amounts to a few hundred of each kind every time I go on a crafting run.
By the way, you can also craft the ash shortbow and shoot the floating rocks that you see above the rune essence wells. You can mine these for essence just like the others!
Tip #2 – Be Careful Around Water!
Unless this is changed in a future update, your movement is significantly slowed down and you can’t dodge while your legs are too deep in water. Pay attention to how your character is moving whenever you need to walk through knee-deep liquids.
This may seem like a non-issue at first, but trust me, there are areas in the game where this can easily lead to your death. One example is in the main quest, where you’ll find yourself in a dungeon full of traps and guardians, and there’ll be relatively deep puddles all around the place.
Be mindful of the environment at all times, or else you might meet an untimely (and quite embarrassing) demise. Find high ground first before you engage an enemy if you’re stuck in water!
Tip #3 – Make a Battlestaff ASAP!
This ties into the first tip, but craft a battlestaff as early as you can. To do this, you’ll first need to make a spinning wheel for some coarse thread. If you don’t have the recipes for these yet, just go and pick up some flax (blue flowers) from the ground.
With a stack of runes, specifically air and fire, you can use them as ammo for basic ranged attacks that deal a decent amount of damage. Not only that, but both have distinct secondary attacks, which are the following:
- Air Runes + Staff: Charge up a projectile that explodes on impact and knocks down enemies within range.
- Fire Runes + Staff: After charging it for a bit, your character will breathe fire in a cone directly in front of them.
Both options are great for crowd control, which will come in handy whenever goblins start raiding your base or randomly hunt you down in the wilds. You can change the equipped runes for the staff through the inventory.
The Magic skill will be expanded on even further in future updates, so expect more attacks and offensive abilities that make use of the staff later on. If you’ve played RuneScape before, then you already know how extensive the spellbook is going to be down the line!
Tip #4 – Make More Than One Base
After following the main quest for a bit or exploring dungeons at your own pace, you’ll eventually find some vault cores (which do respawn, based on my experience). These can be used to build lodestones that you can use to teleport to other lodestones around Ashenfall, whether you made them or they’re part of the map.
With these, you should consider making a base in each region as you will have a way to teleport to each of them in an instant. At the moment, at least as far as I’ve explored, there are four regions with increasing difficulty.
Running to and from these places will be tedious, especially with how enemies will keep chasing you along the way. Travel time isn’t the only thing to think about here too.
Whenever you die, most of your items are dropped on the ground and can be recovered through your gravestone. By having a network of lodestones around the map, you can fast travel close to where you died straight from whichever bed you set as your respawn point.
Some players might tell you to always bring resources to make a lodestone with you whenever you’re traveling. I personally don’t recommend this solely due to how much weight it’ll waste. A single vault core alone will eat up 50 weight.
Tip #5 – Just Enjoy The Ride
The game is still in very early access, seeing as we’re still missing a lot of key features. As of writing this, you can’t even level up the ranged and mage skills yet, despite being able to use them. Just have fun with it and treat it like a sandbox with an incomplete story.
Just look at how loaded the roadmap is at the moment:
Take your time with the current lineup of quests and enjoy the combat and building systems, which are pretty good despite being a bit shallow at the moment. Do note that chests respawn rather quickly, so keep looting them to build up a collection of blueprints if you haven’t already been doing that.
Also, make sure to check every corner while you’re in a dungeon. There are a few rooms hidden out of the way that are easy to miss if you don’t have a light source or aren’t checking high and low! Remember, the map is completely handcrafted, so there are going to be secrets hidden all around it.
That’s really all I have for you at the moment, since everything else is mostly covered by the tutorial quests and I’m sure you can figure things out from there!
